Jennifer

This week I focus on the future development of smart wear equipment and I have a few points that I think it will be further developed in 2020.

4.1 Market size further expand
With the smart wearing equipment advent in 2014, Apple’s Apple Watch advent in 2015,after Huawei’s Huawei Watch, HTC’s Grip fitness bracelet and virtual reality wearing equipment Vive and other new products released, wearable products will become more fashionable, intelligent and the species will be richer. According to IHS estimates, the global wearable equipment market in 2018 will reach billion dollars. IDC expects 2018 global shipments will reach 111.9 million, the annual compound growth rate of 78.4%.

4.2 The industrial chain parties further strengthen cooperation

Wearable equipment market industry chain mainly includes hardware, industry application, social platform, operation service, large data, cloud computing and other aspects. At present, the equipment industry is not mature, the products of different manufacturers are independent, lack of effective sharing data. At the same time each wearable equipment to develop their own applications and data services platform. This end-to-end R & D model invests have high risky, human resources are scattered and difficult to focus on their core strengths. The future of intelligent wear equipment industry chain parties will strengthen cooperation and jointly promote the development of the industry.

4.3 Intelligent wear equipment and related technology to further integration and standardization

Through standardization can promote industrial division of labor and strengthen the exchange of cooperation between enterprises in different areas, so as to optimize the allocation of resources, improve research and development efficiency and quality, making the industry chain to strengthen innovation, to create a core competitiveness of the product. Wearable equipment and mobile phone data management and application interface standardization, easy to achieve a variety of wearable equipment integration, reduce the complexity of third-party development and application, multi-data integration and sharing of standardized, user-friendly management and expansion of the ecological chain.

With the expansion of the smart wear equipment market, smart wear equipment and life and health, mobile Internet technology will be further integrated, wearable equipment, low-power design and R & D level will be further improved, intelligent human-computer interaction technology and product applications will be developed The After further breakthroughs in key technologies such as low-power and high-performance microprocessors, intelligent human-machine interaction, flexible stretchable devices, miniaturized power supply, and short-range wireless communications, the market for smart wear equipment will be further expanded.

4.4 Intelligent wear equipment further strengthen the security

Most intelligent wear devices use an open operating system and are wirelessly connected to external communications. And at this stage of product development more attention is the realization of the function, the safety concerns for the device itself is not high, resulting in a lot of security risks. The main information security risks faced by smart wear devices come from two aspects: internal vulnerabilities and external attacks.

Some of the intelligent dummy devices with virtual reality allow users to distract their attention when they are in use and affect the user’s personal safety. GoogleGlass makes the user’s eyes focus for a long time, which may have an impact on the original human’s physiological structure. All electronic equipment will produce radiation, and intelligent wear equipment and personal contact with the human body, especially glasses, helmets and other wearing equipment, so the intelligent wear equipment into the radiation control, requirements and norms is particularly important. A portion of the wearable device that is in contact with the skin for a long period of time causes the skin of the user to cause discomfort or allergic reactions and the need to prevent damage to the body by the wearable device. With the popularity of intelligent wear equipment, intelligent wear equipment, security will be more attention, its security will be gradually improved.

4.5 Related applications to be more rich

At present, the application for intelligent wear equipment development less. In the number of applications, such as Pebble smart watches have more than 1,000 kinds of applications, and Sony smart watches have more than 200 kinds of applications, Gear is only 70 kinds. Different from the smartphone product user needs, all kinds of smart wear products for different segments of the market, so the intelligent application of the fragile ecosystem of the application, which is one of the reasons for wearing less. Developers have become very difficult to develop applications for these environments, and the cost of time and effort has been greatly enhanced, and the application is the key to the development of smart wear equipment.

In addition, some killer applications are essential for the proliferation of wearable equipment. At present, many of the wearable applications are still like smart phones and tablet applications, the need to wear applications to break this model, for smart phones can not do things to develop applications. The future of smart wear equipment to occupy the important market share of the wristbands class equipment in the health and fitness category will produce killer applications, a native smart wear equipment widely used, will help promote the popularity of smart wear equipment and application development.

Currently used in intelligent wear equipment in the common display technology, including thin film transistor liquid crystal display, active matrix organic light-emitting diodes, organic light-emitting diodes, light-emitting diodes and electronic paper. In addition, the current three kinds of wearable display technology is:

(2) Flexible display: At present, the Japanese semiconductor laboratories, Apple, Samsung, LG, Philips, Nokia and other giants are actively developing and promoting flexible flexible screen, battery and man-machine interface system and patent layout.

3.3 Chip

Intelligent wear device chip can be divided into three categories:

(1) to the existing mobile phone processor as the core of the chip: such as Samsung Galaxy Gear used Exynos 4212, Google Glass used OMAP 4430, its advantage is to effectively use the existing platform to accelerate the development and powerful.

(2) based on single-chip (MCU) products: such as Pebble watches, FitBit One bracelet is based on ARM Cortex-M structure of the MCU products.

(3) specifically for smart wear device chip: Intel introduced for wearable device chip program Intel Edison is a dual-core chip, part of the support Andrews system, the other part is to support real-time operating system; Qualcomm introduced Toq processor, wearable equipment The JC4775 integrates CPU, Flash, LPDDR, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM, NFC and pressure sensors. The JC4775 integrates CPU, Flash, LPDDR, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM, NFC and Pressure Sensors. , Temperature and humidity sensors and all other devices.

3.4 Operating system

Intelligent wear equipment used in the operating system there are three categories:

(1) embedded real-time operating system (RTOS): with low power consumption, the task of a single feature. Such as Samsung smart wristband Gear Fit used real-time operating system.

(2) based on the Android platform to modify the operating system. Such as Samsung’s second generation of smart watches Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo equipped with Tizen operating system.

For intelligent wear equipment applications, short-range wireless communication technology is more suitable for intelligent wear between users, intelligent wear equipment and other portable electronic devices between the data communication and information sharing. At present, intelligent communication equipment and terminal communication is based on W L A N, Bluetooth, NFC and other short-range wireless communication technology, the application of data synchronization using private protocols. Users can connect wearable devices to smartphones via NFC technology, eliminating the need for other complex settings; users can use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology to get data from wearable devices and send data to smartphones or clouds while not Consume too much power; users can also use WLAN direct connection technology directly to the two Wi-Fi devices connected together, no need to set the access point. In addition, intelligent wear equipment can also be 3G, LTE and other mobile communication technology for data transmission or sharing.

3.6 Data calculation processing technology

Human-computer interaction output interface or feedback, including text display, data analysis, voice feedback, dynamic or virtual images, etc., all of these output interface must be presented through the content computing system analysis, such as Augmented Reality (Augmented Reality, AR), virtual Reality (VirtualReality, VR), AR combined with the mixed reality of the mixed reality (MixedReality), three-dimensional projection and other real content calculation and environmental perception analysis and a variety of measurement and analysis, such as blood pressure, blood oxygen, heart rate, pulse, body temperature and so on. In addition, cloud computing, large data and other related data processing technology, intelligent wear equipment can be collected in a timely manner, accurately sent to the background, through the collection of data for effective statistical analysis, users can provide reasonable advice.

3.8 Data interchange technology

The value of smart wear equipment is not only a simple hardware function, but also hardware and software services and data services. However, many manufacturers and cloud applications are closed, there are data islands, can not share data with other devices, the lack of open industry, the ecological environment. Therefore, we need to open and unify the interface between intelligent wear equipment, mobile phone and cloud service, promote the flow and sharing of information, eliminate data island, and create more value for users.

Intelligent wear equipment and cloud platform interaction, according to the different ways of communication can be divided into two kinds: one is intelligent wearing equipment with communication capabilities, can directly interact with the cloud platform; the other is wearing equipment does not have the ability to communicate, Need to interact with the cloud platform through mobile phones.

This week after find a lot of information, I find a number of wearing equipment’s problems need to solve:

1. Accuracy and efficiency
Now wearable equipment and smart phones often have three accelerators, an accelerator error will have a big impact in the overall situation. So, if they have more sensors, the monitoring effect will be much better. For example, we can see heart rate monitoring, skin temperature monitoring and so on, the comprehensive consideration of the data is very important, but it is also very difficult.When we deal with the “personal health” problem, “accurate enough” is not enough and may mislead the user. In the medical field, they need do a lot of careful and meticulous investigation, although it looks difficult in the field for wearable equipment, but these devices still need to be more accurate.

2. Specific occasions, specific product form
In 2013 CES, companies come up with their own wearable equipment, some are wristbands, some are chips, some are watches and some looks like jewelry or clothes. Obviously, manufacturers are trying to different methods. So, the question is about future equipment.In the future people will only wear a type of equipment or will different types of wearable technologies in different occasions?
With the weather changes we will change clothes,in the future do we change wearable equipment just because our behavior changes? But there is a important thing that people use a wearable device when they are passive in recording data do they like a sustainable device？

3. Guidance and advice
The core of wearable equipment is encourage people change their living conditions, do more exercise. Any body sculpting coach will tell the trainees, maintain a new habit after change the living habits is very difficult. So for a trainee, lose a little weight is not successful. So many wearable equipment manufacturers and some body sculpting center have a cooperate to make sure users can achieve the goal. This device + service model may become a mainstream in the future. Data analysis experts can also make a more direct and more feasible method based on the recorded data.

4. Basic defects
Some people who use traditional electronic watch change their battery once a year or two years, they may not accept recharged every day. A smart watch battery capacity must take into account the fuselage design, so the current we can see many smart watch battery only have hundreds of millionaires. The battery capacity is too small will dramatically decrease battery life, this is the manufacturer’s problems. Nowadays, including Android Wear devices, Apple Watch, etc technical barriers are still biggest reason, these early intelligent smart watch just move some technology from mobile phone, only the field of proprietary technology has a new breakthrough can solve these basic defects.

5.Some minor problems
1. High return rate. Some bracelets are easy to damage, many users can not charge and high repair rate.
2. Material issues. Some users use Fibit bracelet them material of the bracelet lead to allergies.
3. Data Accuracy. For example, some smart watch or bracelet, if you just not exercise bracelet will still think you are in a state of motion and calculate the corresponding consumption of calories and other information, but in fact you did not consume energy.
4. Privacy issues. People use goole glass,they can blink their eyes to control the camera, you do not know what time you were at the shoot. In the cinema and other places which prohibit take pictures and video, people use google glass can silently record whole movie or in the absence of permission to take pictures.
5. Security issues. By some user who has been use google glass,they need to re-focus when they look at the small screen, if they can not see the road it is dangerous.

This week I investigated the production materials of wear technology, a good wear products, not only need to have attractive features, but also need good production of materials.
When a user buy a wearable device, he will wear this product on his body for a long time. The user will have a skin contact with wearable device. This means that the equipment need to choice correct materials, must take full account of the impact of materials on the skin. If the developer in the price competition process want to save cost and choose a relatively inexpensive material, it may lead to user’s skin damage.

On the other hand, some developers in order to pursue “beauty”, choose some test materials which have not been fully tested, such as poor quality metals, leather materials etc.they will cause symptoms such as skin allergies. Because the user use them their skin will produce sweat and some other secretion, they will make the wearing environment changes and skin contact may give users a health impact. Such as changes pH, temperature, humidity and ambient temperature. These skin surfaces and external environmental changes will affect the material in certain extent. Once the wearable device material has been affected, like physical changes or chemical changes, may cause the user’s health problems.

Therefore, for the current wearable equipment industry entrepreneurs, after some exploration, developer must have more in-depth thinking in product development and material selection is a basic key in user experience also is can not be ignored product development points.

Why wear equipment can not be separated from plastic?

At present, wearable equipments are not practical, the classification of these products are not appropriate. Although most of wearable equipment uses plastic and rubber materials, but some people don’t like plastic products.In this regard, many people they like to wear product which make from wool,leather, gold and precious stones.It don’t mean that the functionality of the products is not important. If people don’t like plastic products, the products which made from plastic materials will not be popular in the market for a long time.

Why wear equipment can not be separated from plastic and other polymer materials?

Because plastic and other materials they are excellent performance, can be the best choice for manufacturing.
1.Strong (Durability): plastic is a good choice for wearing electronic products, because they can use in long-term, strong and not easy to damaged, some plastic material smart bracelet and metal material Apple watch dropped on the floor at the same time,Normally, the break one is not plastic material bracelet.
2.Scratch resistance (Scratch resistance): plastic is highly resistant to scratching the material, which is very helpful, because the wearable equipment in daily activities will inevitably be abrasions and wear, plastic almost no friction in the process What loss.
3. Flexibility (Flexibility): if people want to do sports, a lot of plastic made wearable equipment can stretch the body with you.
4. Light (Lightweight): lightweight plastic wearable equipment can let people feel they wear nothing.
5. Waterproof (Resistant in water): Many wearable equipment made of plastic don’t worry about this, many materials can even be directly submerged in the water.

This week, I’ve been looking for some information about wearable technology and I found a lot of academic reports. I found some interesting articles and they’ve come up with some ideas and challenges about wearable technology in terms of health.
In 2013, we felt some impact of wearable technology in education, communications, navigation and other fields. However, the greatest potential should be in field of health care.Now, wearable technology has been used to revolutionize healthcare through assisted surgeon surgery and real-time access to electronic medical records.The potential of wearable technology in the medical field is more than doctor’s assistant. In 2014 wearable devices tracked user’s heart rate, blood pressure and blood oxygen levels,patients can track their health status.So maybe in 2018, shipments of wearable devices will expected to reach million units.

Information interconnection

Traditionally, health care information is usually paper-based. Integration synthesis and analysis different data are difficult and costly, but healthcare needs to be developed more economically and more evidence-based. In addition, some regulatory rules based on privacy security, such as HIPPA is preventing sharing health care data.

If people want to successfully to use wearable health technology , it is necessary to find ways to develop networks that allow information access and provide support to the back end. This has been achieved in a small scale: Fitbit users and other health tracking products can see their own personal data and compare it with other users.If there is a network that can be seamlessly connected to a wider population then more meaningful data comparisons and can be made to analyze useful information. This could promote wearable health technology sellers to work with institutions national networks and access large-scale health data. The network can integrate data collected from wearable devices and other health data, create a complete health community .Create a healthy community and collecting data from it, is a way to package valuable health data. By bringing people who have the same interests, such as losing weight together, wearable becomes a mechanism for building interaction and compiling information simultaneously. It’s a reasonable way: you know about people’s health,you can more effective keep them healthy.

For example, through the electronic health record of patients in physical examination, medical treatment and so on, we can understand the allergic situation, health history and medication situation. With the integration of data collected by wearable devices, health providers can be more complete and basic real-time data to treat and manage individual patients and common patients.

This week I focus on smart chip，I find nine different chips which is popular in wearable technology.

NO.1：CC2538

A large on board system (SoC) for high-performance Zigbee applications, launched by industry pioneer TI, which produces the first integrated circuit. It contains a powerful micro controller based ARM Cortex M3 (MCU) system, this system has up to 32K on-chip RAM and 512K on-chip flash memory, which makes it possible to deal with security, including demanding applications and wireless download complex network stack. Very suitable for: Internet of things, intelligent lighting systems, home lan.

2、Includes a powerful debugging system and an integrated drive library.

3、Quick wakeup from sleep can be achieved, and energy consumption during cycle time tasks is greatly reduced.

Evaluation: the dynamic properties of the Internet of things, home automation, and lighting systems determine the need for high performance and high flexibility to meet the manufacturer’s needs for different memory, security, and standard support. CC2538 is a unique market unique product that not only has high integration, but also supports ZigBee and other IP based standards such as 802.15.4 and 6LoWPAN IPv6.

NO.2：CC3100

CContinue to lead by TI, a product that can connect any low-cost, low-power microcontroller (MCU) to the Internet of things (I0T). CC3100 wireless networking solution is the new SimpleLink Wi-Fi series of products, this product can greatly simplify the realization of Internet connectivity. At the same time, all protocols for Wi-Fi and the Internet, which minimize the requirements for host MCU software. Very suitable for: networking, cloud connectivity, intelligent socket.

Main features and advantages:

1、A complete solution of the platform, including a variety of tools and software, sample applications, users and programming guide, reference design and TI E2E to support the community

3、You can connect to either 8, 16, or 32 bit MCU via the SPI or UART interface

Evaluation: CC3100 has the industry’s lowest power consumption, high flexibility, enabling customers to easily add embedded Wi-Fi and Internet capabilities to a wide range of home, industrial and consumer electronics products.

NO.3：MPL3115A2

The absolute Xtrinsic intelligent pressure sensor, developed by Freescale, an embedded processing solution vendor, provides very accurate pressure and altitude data with the ability to adjust the sampling frequency with very low power consumption and is ideal for: wearable Equipment, high precision measurement, inertial navigation.

3、 Can be processed in the local sensor data, reducing the communication requirements with the main processor, so that the use of MCU control

Evaluation: The MPL3115A2 has a variety of intelligent functions, eliminating the need for mobile devices, medical and security applications for data processing, which for the ALICE implantable wearable equipment is undoubtedly an urgent need.

Evaluation: The power of the AT86RF232 transceiver is 50% lower than competing products and has all the essential features of the latest wireless applications that support the consumer market segment, including excellent RF performance, lower power, high link budget And antenna diversity.

NO.5：AD9644

A dual-channel serial output ADC for smart antenna systems, powered by ADI, a leading provider of data conversion and signal processing technology, is designed to provide solutions for high performance, low cost, small size, multi-functional intelligent communication applications , But also for general software radio, ultrasound equipment.

Key Features and Benefits:

1, the on-chip PLL allows the user to provide a single ADC sample clock, the data rate clock multiplied by the PLL by the ADC sampling clock

Evaluation: This processor is ideal for applications that require a high-performance user interface for 2D and 3D graphics cards, one or two high-resolution displays and highly integrated systems, and apply advanced consumer electronics user experience and device connectivity to the future Of the car system.

NO.7：CC3000

And a very good device, and CC3100 are SimpleLink family, a Wi-Fi 802.11b / g wireless network processor, this processor simplifies the implementation of Internet connectivity, so become the use of any low cost and low power The ideal solution for embedded applications with MCUs is ideal for: home appliances, home automation, home security.

Key Features and Benefits:

1, with millions of instructions per second (MIPS) and low-cost microcontrollers (MCUs) running with a compact memory package

2, integrated crystal and power management

Evaluation: CC3000 has the best RF performance in its class, can significantly reduce development time, reduce manufacturing costs, save board space, simplify the certification process, and greatly reduce the RF professional knowledge requirements.

NO.8：R261

A high-performance voice-capture system-on-a-chip, a complete system-on-a-chip (SoC) solution, is available in the industry’s high-performance, ON Semiconductor, which provides advanced dual-microphone noise reduction capture applications in voice. The chip keeps the voice more natural even if the speaker is farther away from or without voice clarity with the microphone, providing unparalleled best degree of freedom for any portable audio application with voice.

Key Features and Benefits:

1, can customize the ability of multiple voice recording mode and adjust the unique needs of the algorithm

Rating: R261 offers a simple choice, in any place to enjoy a clear and comfortable voice communication. This product uses advanced noise reduction technology, so that all kinds of portable consumer electronics manufacturers can significantly improve the voice quality and customer satisfaction.

NO.9：MAG3110

A Freescale’s first Xtrinsic high-precision 3D magnetic sensor, representing Freescale’s further expansion of the consumer sensor products. The MAG3110 is a small, low-power, digital 3-axis magnetometer with a wide dynamic range that can be run on printed circuit boards (PCBs) with external magnetic fields for 3D motion control and directional, wireless mouse and Fixed-point equipment, navigation and location services.

Key Features and Benefits:

1, configure the GPS device, can achieve the direction of positioning services

Evaluation: MAG3110 has high resolution, low noise and ultra-small size and other characteristics, the magnetic field where the magnetometer to measure the magnetic field and the magnetic field generated by the circuit board device, and the total of the two local magnetic field, combined with the 3-axis acceleration sensor When used, you can obtain accurate compass heading information without direction.

Smart jewelry, at present I can defined they are wearable smart jewelry.For me,I think it is different between the traditional jewelry and jewelry industry, wearable smart jewelry is a kind of “core” products, but they must have some new thing.

By looking up materials to find out current market, most of smart jewelry are stainless steel intelligent jewelry and ceramics smart jewelry.A lot of them aren’t really jewelry. They’re mostly accessories, just wear on your fingers or neck.The jewelry which we always called,they usually have precious metal and gem products.At present, smart jewelry’s functions only focus on health, mobile phone reminders, single function, they can replaced by the likes of smartphones, users need more convenient and more simple products.Intelligent is not jewelry’s direction but accessories is, especially in my country, because some limits in China consumption concept, intelligence is bound to enhance the functionality of luxury goods ,have a negative effect for the development of potential consumers of jewelry. Intelligent, is bound to increase some electronic components, women are not sensitive to this, the value of recognition is not high.Therefore,I think smart jewelry should referred to as “Internet jewelry”, through the combination of jewelry and Internet to achieve some functional things.Capture the market by through functions and services,earn other consumer profits from service.

For Internet jewelry, it also faces other problems, compared with the smart watch which price only need few hundred dollars, Internet jewelry tens of thousand dollars price is a disadvantage. For new things, consumers are more willing to pay for the smart watch because them price is relatively cheap. Secondly, under the restriction of the intelligent chip,while Bluetooth can smoothly connected with jewelry,how to ensure the beauty of Internet jewelry design are also big problems that every jewelry manufacturer needs to solve.

At present, there are many technical problems that can not be solved: the battery capacity is small, the chip size is difficult to narrow, it lead to smart jewelry be more bigger, chip technology is not mature. This makes smart jewelry “aborted” in recent years, In a not mature scale in the background, many smart jewelry market have a severe lesson, brought a painful price to the downstream terminal distributors. Internet jewelry is engraved with “bulky”, “technologically immature” impression.

In order to win a broader market, Internet jewelry need pay addition to the development of chip technology and jewelry technology continues to strengthen and also should pay more attention to the jewelry industry and other industries cross-border integration.